Startup life in NYC. A pagerank 0 blog.
Tech
The Scene Will Thrill You
01 year ago
Brad Hargreaves had a phenomenal post on his blog yesterday. The core of it was a warning that succumbing to the groupthink of tech circles will hamper innovation, and lead you to develop your products for the wrong customers.
I agree with what Brad posted. The tech scene can be a succubus eager to suck down your time and innovation. It's easy to adapt your business to the ideas of whatever big-shot graces you with his thoughts. No matter how experienced or tech-famous they are, however, you can never please everybody. Think about how many investors pass on companies that eventually get funding. Even the pros aren't always right. Don't compromise your vision.
This post won't be a rant on scene issues, but is more to say why the scene can be a beautiful thing, if you have the self control to avoid it consuming you. As a solo founder, the NYC tech scene has been a source of inspiration and support. This may not be as important to a small team of founders bunkered down, working on the next big thing, but for me, the opportunity to get feedback from my peers and from tech veterans is invaluable. Take what everybody says with a grain of salt, but take it regardless. Quite bluntly, without the tech scene, I would know so much less about the tech industry, and peculiarities surrounding it.
Scenester tips:
Avoid going starry-eyed and getting excited over tech celebrities. They got there by working hard and smart, and you can too.
Be honest in your feedback to others. Politeness often comes off as brown-nosing. Don't be afraid to disagree or call somebody's baby ugly. If they have half a brain and you have good points, they'll thank you for it.
It's not a beauty pageant. Know what you want out of an event before going. Being a social butterfly is useless without actual progress on your business. The scene is your support network, not your business.
So you want to be a tech scenester? Here are a few great resources to find out what goes on every week.
StartupDigest - Top notch tech/hacker/entrepreneur event mailing list.
This Week in NYC Innovation (NYC only) – Charlie O'Donnell's weekly newsletter on what's going on in the upcoming week. The only subscription email that I open every time.
Meetup.com – Tried and true. Pick a few decent niche events to get instant community around what you care about.
There are other ways to find events as well, but the 3 above provide plenty of opportunity to me. Turning into a networking junkie just serves to waste your time. Focus on building a killer business and people will want to talk with you about it.
Netflix Culture slides
1Old stuff in the tech world, but profound nonetheless. Set aside 30 minutes to absorb these. It is time that will be repaid in the future.
Netflix Culture
View more presentations from Reed Hastings.
On the history of complexity
2This is just astoundingly beautiful. Also a nice source for a few Wikipedia pages I should go read up on…
Thanks to Nick Baily for this great find.
Profitably just launched at DEMOcon!
21 year ago
Adam Neary's Profitably just launched at DEMOcon out on the left coast. He's an alum of the Founder's Institute, and has been working crazy-hard on product over the last year.
If you manage finances for a small business, Profitably is making headway to save you time and headaches. You should go check them out.
From the site:
What is Profitably?
Profitably is small business analytics, simplified. Our product provides a simple and intuitive view into your QuickBooks data along with tools to drive growth and manage profitability.
If you are a CFO or VP of Finance for a small business, or if finance is one of your many hats, Profitably can make your life a lot easier. In minutes we can help you understand where you are making money and where you are losing money…why…and what you can do about it.
The only thing holding Foursquare back is GPS technology
51 year ago
by Mike
in Tech Industry
To be honest, I think checking in is obnoxious and un-natural. That's not to say I don't do it, but it's disruptive to the social flow, and so getting it to be habit with a critical mass will be incredibly difficult. Some my friends don't know where their phone even is at any given point in time.
In a day not too far in the future, civilian GPS technology will be accurate enough to enable the coveted "auto-checkin." When that day comes, the gate is truly open, and we're off to the races. Everybody will try to catch up, but Foursquare already has the head-start.
How to integrate Mongoengine into Pylons
0Integrating Mongoengine into Pylons is really quick and painless if you know where to put stuff.
Add your DB settings to your development.ini file
mongodb.host = host[,replHost2]
mongodb.port = port
mongodb.db = db_name
mongodb.username = uname
mongodb.password = pass
Connect to MongoDB in config/environment.ini
At the top, include Mongoengine
from mongoengine import connect
And at the bottom, just before we return, include the following line:
# Connect with Mongoengine
connect(config['mongodb.db'], host=config['mongodb.host'], port=int(config['mongodb.port']), username=config['mongodb.username'], password=config['mongodb.password'])
Add your models
Now we can create our models just like in the Mongoengine documentation.
Use the right tools
01 year ago
This sounds so dead obvious that most people will probably think about not even reading this.
Read it, and use it to refresh your frame of thought on the issue. This is one of the most important parts of building anything.
Every tool has trade-offs. In the software world, that trade-off is usually related to how much it can do, compared to how much effort it takes to do it.
If you want a house, you could start with:
- Atoms. It's possible, and they can certainly be combined to make yourself a house, but this is going to take wayyy too long.
- Raw materials. This is certainly reasonable, and strikes a balance. You can build the house you want without going too deep.
- Pre-fabbed frame. This is even faster and cheaper than raw lumber, but you're losing control over what your house looks like.
- A house. Hey, nobody said you can't just buy the house. Of course, you now have no say over the details of your house.
Software works in much the same way. If you want a website that does a specific thing, you could write your own webservers in assembly if you were insane. Likewise, you could just go out and buy a pre-written package that does what you want. The problem with innovative software, however, is that it doesn't already exist, at least not your vision of it. This is the point where people say "Ok, well, what are the biggest pieces that exist for each part that I need? I'll just stitch them together!" Stop. Seriously. Stop right there.
This sort of "greatest common factors" solution is often right, and can save you time. On the other hand, it can also lead you down a maze of problems that you may never return from. Every time you take on a 3rd party component, you become dependent upon their choices and design decisions. Depending upon the component, this can be good and bad. It could mean that you get free new features down the road as they are added. It could also mean that you have to manage through 12 layers of abstractions just to use the 5% of that component that you actually need.
Don't re-invent the wheel, but also don't go buy another wheel when all you needed was the spoke.
How important are you on Twitter? (the Twitter hierarchy)
21 year ago
by Mike
in Tech Industry
In a nutshell, the Twitter ecosystem resembles a pyramid. Where you are on the pyramid roughly depends upon the number of followers you have, and your following-to-followers ratio.
If you're into amassing followers, witty content helps, but for people who associate their Twitter account with themselves (ie, not @BPGlobalPR), it's really a just a facet of your public persona. Important person = important Twitter. Content has very little to do with it.
Take, for instance, @the_real_shaq. Take a look at those tweets. Seriously, read them. 3 million followers, and it ain't cuz of the content. Furthermore, he's following 611 people at the time of this writing. Followers-to-following? ~5000:1
How big somebody's mega-phone is directly correlates to the social power that they wield. Despite the quality of his tweets, tell me you wouldn't be smiling if he @'ed you. 3 million impressions is a whole lot of clout, even if it has nothing to do with your industry or core focus.
How high their followers-to-following ratio is indicates how much they respect the people they are following. Somebody who follows as many people are following them essentially look like "I'll scratch yours if you scratch mine" folks. It's kiss-ass and it shows. Following 611 while being followed by 3M screams "People want to listen to me, and I don't have to beg for it."
When you apply this across the entire fabric of our Twitter ecosystem, it forms a pyramid. That dude that everyone in you industry respects and follows? You'd love to have him RT a link back to your site. Guess what? He's be equally as happy if the mayor of his city tweeted about him, and that mayor would be elated if Shaq RT'd something he said. It works all the way up. And guess what? Shaq doesn't give a damn if you RT him because he doesn't know who you are. Trust me, your content isn't winning him over.
Building a virtual data center using VirtualBox and Ubuntu
3In this guide, I'm going to show you how to create a virtual data center, right on your computer. The virtual servers will be able to communicate with each other in a private network. I'll also be able to communicate with them from the outside as well. Honestly, I hope you have a lot of RAM.
Ok, let's go!
I'm personally running a Windows 7 PC, but will be bringing up 3 Ubuntu Server instances. These instruction, with a little common sense, should work for any host OS. Because I'm using Ubuntu Server, there won't be any GUIs here to use as a crutch. Dust off those command line skills.
Get and install VirtualBox
VirtualBox is the virtual machine handler that we'll be using to deploy our virtual servers. Download and install the latest version (duh).
Get Ubuntu Server
If your processor supports hardware virtualization, download the 64-bit image. If it doesn't, or you have no idea what that means, download the 32-bit image.
Ubuntu is a great Debian-based Linux distribution that has some really phenomenal adoption and community support. Download the latest version of Ubuntu Server. We'll use that to install Ubuntu on our VM (virtual machine) instances.
Create the first server
In VirtualBox, select 'New'
Name your machine. I'm calling mine 'head'. Select Linux as the OS, and Ubuntu as the version.
Select how much RAM to allocate. It will depend upon your specific needs (and how much RAM you have total), but the default work for now.
Boot a hard disk, and select to create a new one.
You want dynamically expanding storage.
Finish everything up.
Congrats you now have a virtual machine with nothing on it.
Settings
Select 'Settings' for your server, and go to the Network pane.
Set adapter 1 to bridged mode. Select the appropriate network adapter to bridge it to.
Select the Adapter 2 tab.
Enable it, and attach it to an 'Internal Network'. Name the network whatever you like.
Installing Ubuntu Server
Select your VM and select 'Start'. You'll be walked through the 'First Run Wizard'
Browse for your Ubuntu image you downloaded earlier, and select that. Finish up the wizard.
Go through the installation process for Ubuntu. Default settings will be fine. Select eth0 as your primary network interface.
I'm not going to walk you through the details. There are better guides here.
After the OS installs and you boot for the first time, run sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get upgrade to ensure you have the latest updates for your system.
Go Headless
http://www.toptensoftware.com/VBoxHeadlessTray/
We want to go headless with our little datacenter, so go grab VBoxHeadlessTray to make managing headless VMs a lot easier.
Install whatever software you need onto the VM. Whatever you install here is going to be present on all future cloned machines.
Clone VMs
Something along the lines of "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" clonehd db1.vdi db2.vdi
Obviously, the *.vdi files will be whatever you want them to be. That just happened to be my names.
Create a new VM for each of these cloned hard drives with the same settings as above.
There you go. Clone as many times as you would like. Once you get their IP addresses from an ifconfig, you're more than welcome to go SSH into them. Makes management a lot easier, especially if you need a lot of boxes.
Note: If you're having difficulties getting your clones machines onto the network, Ubuntu probably cached the MAC addresses. just run sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and reboot